On Walden Pond, Where Thoreau Practiced Self-Resistance and Ate Squirrels

by W. Barksdale
MaynardThoreau
Society Bulletin, No. 241 (Fall 2002)

Reprinted by
permission of the author and the Thoreau Society Bulletin.
Editor’s Note: At the request of the author, all spelling and grammar errors
were allowed to remain.

For the historian
researching the history of Walden Pond, it’s not always easy to separate truth
from fiction.

Even the brochure
“20 Key Facts about Walden Pond” issued by the Massachusetts Department of
Environmental Management, the agency responsible for the pond and surrounding
state land, is only partly accurate.

Walden is not
“spring fed,” but rather a flow-through lake.

Nor is it true
that “the main pond path is an old Indian path”; it was built in the 1930s and
has little relationship to the undulating, barely perceptible trail Thoreau
saw.

When such
“official” sources are wrong, you can imagine how much inaccuracy is to be found
elsewhere—much of it unintentionally funny. For example, John A. Herbert’s
travel piece in the St. Petersburg [Florida] Times, “For Hiking, Biking, Try
Walden Pond.”

Yes, “Biking,”
notwithstanding the fact that the second sentence of the article reports that
things prohibited at the pond include “bikes.” Perhaps Herbert is encouraging us
to act in the spirit of what he calls “the definitive book on civil
disobedience, Walden, which would have trashed all these modern
prohibitions.”

Herbert’s
descriptions of Walden Pond suggest a somewhat limited familiarity with the
place. It is “part of a 400-acre Massachusetts state park. The land was donated
by the Concord family of author-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as the Hard
Rock Cafe chain, Reebok and AT&T.” He supposes that “many visitors in swimsuits
approach Walden with the same hushed voices they probably save for church. Nor
is there any litter in sight.”

As for Thoreau, he
“was given a small piece of wooded land by the Emerson family…. He spent a few
years there thinking about the meaning of life, and he published his treatise on
civil disobedience years later. After Thoreau moved from the cabin in the 1850s,
it was used to store grain. By 1870, the cabin had been torn down for scrap
lumber and to roof over an outhouse.”

From the “postwar
replica” [of 1985, actually] in the parking lot “the stone foundation of the
original cabin is a 15-minute walk overlooking the entrance to the pond.”

Warming to his
subject, Herbert adds, “Developers had first envisioned Walden as a site for
condominiums and shopping malls…. Thoreau might have liked the naming of
complexes after him and Walden Pond.” Thoreau bravely spoke “against slavery and
what he saw as economic injustices” before his death; now “he’s buried in the
300-year-old [actually from 1855] Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.”

Herbert’s article
is amusing in the breadth of its inaccuracies, but the Web offers the most
fertile ground for error. (Appropriately, Herbert’s article is online at
www.sptimes.com/News/ 090901/Travel/For_hiking__biking__t.shtml) The truly
devoted Thoreauvian might consider moving to the following development in
Lynchburg, Virginia—as advertised on the Web:

On some websites
devoted to Thoreau, readers weigh in with observations that make the historian
smile.

“If one reads
for pleasure, than Walden is certainly a buffet of great porportions”—
especially the chapter, “Nature.”

Another
commentator is less enthusiastic: “Henry David Thoreau (whose real name was
David Henry Thoreau … maybe he was dyslexic) decided to take a break from
civilization for a couple of years and write a flowery book that no one can
understand.”

“Thoreau was not
self-reliant. He couldn’t hold a job…. [He] subsisted mainly on what he could
gather on the ground to eat (like a squirrel)…. Thoreau was a 19th century
version of a starving artist, tree-hugging hippie and homeless bum rolled all
into one.”

“What is the
main idea of civil disobedience?? I was reading through it and the language
that was used was soooo flowery and it just went right over my head. can
anyone explain it to me?”

“I have to do a
report on Thoreau’s Walden, and how self resistance is applied … can anyone
help out??? or does anyone know where there are quotes from Walden, with what
peoples interpetations of what they mean??”

“Essay due
tomorrow…. Please if anyone could helps me with this. Give me some examples or
where to look or just give it straigt out…. Topic: ‘What evidence exists that
Thoreau was anti-slavery?’”

“Okay, I’m
writing a comprehensive essay on Thoreau’s works, philisophical beliefs, and a
full biographical sketch [in] two pages…. I don’t think I can do it without
cutting something major out. Any suggestions?”

“Could someone
please help! I have a presentation to do on Civil Disobedience. I want to know
what is the importance of Civil Disobedience, what are the important themes
emanating from Civil Disobedience, what consructive, and negative critiscisms
can be made about Civil Disobedience? In addition could someone tell me of
differenr sites i can go to get help on Thoreau’s Waldon Pond. Thanks A
Million!”

Assisting these
hapless scholars are purported Thoreau Chatroom Experts, cloaked, for some
reason, in anonymity. “Freaky Deaky” — who, one suspects, is something less than
a Walter Harding — is nonetheless lauded by one fan as “intelligent end a great
help to students of Literature.”

The Experts
encourage scholarship, of a sort. A college student posts, full-text, her
groundbreaking essay, “Walden as a 12 Step Program,” in which it is argued that
“Thoreau receives guidance from the Pond; similar to the guidance an alcoholic
obtains from their A.A. sponsor.” This fires the imagination of an Expert, who
chirps, “It seems to me that you might be able to get it published. You might
ask your professor if he would be interested in becoming a coauthor.”

How did the
published-scholar-to-be first become interested in Thoreau? “It was a few weeks
ago when he [Thoreau] was the assigned author of the day for my Early American
Literature Class…. Until then, I have never heard of him. Actually, I have only
read one book for leisure, Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Album.”

On amazon.com,
peanut-gallery reviewers critique Walden. Few of them seem likely to join
the Thoreau Society:

“Why does it
seem that students from around the country are all being forced by their
English teachers to read this stinking book!”

“I just had the
misfortune of reading this piece of junk for my summer reading … the worst
book that I had ever read in my whole life!”

“The things this
dude said made absolutely no sense [and] we get to see what neurosis plagued
his diseased mind…. Pages upon pages of vivid description about scenery, the
little fighting ants, the whippor-whill, the squirrels under the floorboards,
the bees … how they infested his cozy little shack … what do we care about his
pests in nature? I mean, how much can you really say about ice melting?”

Leaving the
Internet (with relief) and turning to quaint, old-fashioned reality, we may flip
through the guestbook at the Thoreau house replica at Walden Pond State
Reservation for further insights into public perceptions. Here are dubious
tributes:

“My dog’s name
is Thoreau.”

“My dad named me
after looking at the sky over Thoreau’s Cove.”

The nagging
question of Henry’s sexuality is conclusively settled by a visitor from
Montana, who writes, “I’m a descendant of Thoreau.”

Visitors offer
their favorite Thoreau quotations, including, “With all its sham, drudgery, and
broken dreams, it’s still a beautiful world.” But alas, those Amazon.comian
skeptics are here, too:

“He was moocher
and he smelled!”

“We know Emerson
brought him food.”

As for his
paucity of furniture, “He could of went to Pier One.”

One visitor
echoes that familiar refrain, “Did he eat squirrels?”

“I liked the movie
better,” one tourist writes in the guestbook. This baffles me. I encounter
another reference: “Seen the film, now the lake.” I don’t quite understand this
either, until a third encounter: “It’s time to re-read ‘On Walden Pond.’ ” Um,
could you possibly be thinking of the 1981 movie, On Golden Pond? You
know—the one starring that rascally old squirrel-eater, Henry Thoreaufonda?